The ubiquitous IEEE 802.11 standard exhibits a significant amount of MAC protocol overhead inherent to contention-based random access protocols. To alleviate this overhead and improve protocol performance, a dynamic protocol timing adaptation scheme is proposed whereby the fundamental 802.11 slot time and inter-frame spacing are reduced based on techniques that exploit the actual maximum propagation distance within a wireless LAN, in addition to advances in PHY layer technologies that facilitate faster MAC processing and carrier sensing. We show through numerical analysis that the proposed scheme has the theoretical potential to increase system throughput and improve the performance of both current and emerging high-throughput 802.11 wireless LAN standards.

Relation

International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC'09). Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Communications and Mobile Computing: Connecting the World Wirelessly (Leipzig, Germany 21-24 June, 2009) p. 785-789